hifred

Thanks for confirming.

Picking Crop-Presets is not working here. Win10. In that gif I'm clicking several times, but it does nothing.

There's countless threads in this forum where people ask for a DAM. Serif confirms that there's some plans, but so far they didn't reveal what they are working on. Reading the requests brought up by users I see that they ask for very different things: Some want a straightforward viewer app, others even request complex database driven software with nifty filtering options to handle huge asset collections. The term DAM unfortunately isn't very clearly defined. Hence my question: Do you need a DAM-program by Serif? And what should it be like? [Edit: Unfortunately I can not do anything about the terrible Poll formatting. Maybe staff can add an empty line between the questions?]

Thank you - now I know what you mean. It's probably up to the individual use case but I personally would not need and want this particular feature. It's not only Photoline's notorious uglyness on display here - I imagine this per layer printout of parameters generally hard to implement in a way that doesn't look terribly busy. I'd be served well enough with a reliable mechanism to target and quickly cycle through all layers under my cursor and getting a readout of the active layers settings in the stack. It kind of equals reading with a ruler - and is more in line with how I would analyze a file. Just for the record: one may navigate through layers, chance opacity and blend modes with the keyboard inside Photoshop as well.

The single file editor I know (and no more use) Xara only lets you edit in a single graphics file with features similar to Master pages and such. The output html obviously deals with all pages separately.

Thank you Officer ! With a similar mindset one could of course also (correctly) state that a purely commandline based photo editor can run operations on images a lot more efficienty and that all sorts of recent AI developments could get implemented a lot quicker too. Still most people here would not want to learn image editing that way :o). There's great value in editing visually, also for Web-Work, there's a learning curve advantage in transfering eding concepts from one familiar area to another* – it helped me a lot that my 3D rendering program uses the same concepts as a real world camera (and that's of course not at all how a renderer works internally). An important factor is frequency of use – what's easier to memorize after months of pause: A GUI or abstract text snippets? Even when willing to learn coding there's a lot of decisions which visual editors have already taken out of your hands: What fundamental principle do I use (bootstrap/foundation or anything fancy new) What are the advantages of each one – one needs to be competent enough to answer all this and to separate relevant from irrelevant... Can I solve all my problems with my own code? Or will I have to embed third party code anyway, because it was silly to code up a complex slider myself? Finally one could state that most of all this fundamental stuff doesn't really matter anyway - as one needs smoking hot content + awesome SEO + all sorts of social media + paid marketing to actually succeed online. That all being said – of all editors discussed I also found Pinegrow most attractive conceptually. But it doesn't take long and the narrator has lost me, even in dumbed down demonstration videos. Doesn't look like a product intended for the casual user to me. *here DTP

Thanks for your insights @Medical Officer Bones Do you also have an opinion on Coffee Cup RSD or the upcoming Nicepage (Artisteer successor)? Of all these programs is there one which lets you handle a 30+ pages site as a single document? Similar to the Xaras DTP-ish approach, but with a smarter responsive design concept? And is there one program among the ones you which lets you create multilingual websites with the same ease as in e.g. Wordpress?

Could you elaborate on this a bit more or post a screenshot? It's been a while since I last played with Photoline.

I'm also surprised how wrong the choice of a checkmark as an icon appears to me. I'm familiar with Eye-Icons or also Lightbulbs in different states to indicate visibility. But the checkmark? It is an indicator of something in active state – and in this sense it is conflicting with the concept of layer locking. A locked layer, albeit showing a checkmark is not active – but it is visible (that again is nothing the checkmark can tell us). The layer editor really deserves getting redone from scatch. Coming from Photoshop and being a really lazy layer namer I often don't know what I'm looking at in Affinity Photo – already in documents with just a few layers. Layers and masks being super tiny and displaying square (regardless of the aspect ratio of the document) is terrible, in particular when working on several monitors. In PS I need one click to give a window focus and can see right away that I'm looking at the correct layer stack: Yup, it has a portrait orientation, I can even see what's happening on layers and masks. Affinity by Design holds back all this valueable information, with it's generic 16x16px miniatures.

I can't speak for the OP – but the inititial statement was...

I guess, this is meant...

Ok, just to summarize things a bit: Linked placing seems to work unreliably right now. Photoshop exported content links ok, Affinity Photo 1.6 files do get embedded. The feature I asked for (display control for files which are linked) seems not to exist. Being able to doubleclick a placed files (as I understand it) is an indicator of a file being embedded – it's unrelated to the original question.

Let's wait what they come up with, when linking actually works. Yes doubleclicking and changing something in the placed image does work, as everything gets embedded right now. But that's not what I described in my last post – I did some external edits on placed afphoto- files (inside Aphoto) and found out that they were indeed not reflected in the Publisher-document –not even after re-opening Publisher. This only served as a proof that file-linking indeed is broken currently. My initial request differs from what @dominik suggests, as this requires embedded files.

Sorry double post.

You can solve that problem with free programs like Sage Thumbs.

Hmm – what you suggest afaik can only work on embedded files. I just tried to force Publisher to only linkt to a placed file but it always appears as "embedded" in the Layer stack. That's the case even after choosing "link" in the dialog and after having set the file to "prefer linked". Test wise I updated the source file in APhoto and saved. As there's no Link panel yet I checked "Automatically update linked resources when modified externally" and saved the Publisher file. It re-opened with the unaltered image in it, so it was indeed embedded. Seems that file linking isn't available yet in Publisher. __________________________ I wondered if selective reading of linked (referenced) files was possible too. That way one could control the appearance of files which are not part of the document.

Indesign has a powerful feature which lets me select the layer-display of referenced (not embedded) Photoshop psd's or Illustrator .ai files. A checkbox in the Importer lets users check select just the layers (or layer comps) they need, but one can re-access the layer display dialog at any time later via Object/Object Layer Options and the display of the placed file updates correspondingly. Is similar already available for placed Affinity files or even other layered document types (psd, tif)? If not – is this planned?

I just wanted to be realistic here. As Affinity has the numbers combo already in place from opacity it should not take them long to create a variation of the same principle for Flow. It was very helpful if someone sat down and hooked this badly missing stuff up. I am all for elegant, minimalist onscreen controls for the brush, which even do different things, depending on the drag direction. Unfortunately Affinitys current implementation for interactive brush control is so clumsy and conceptually flawed (in particular for pen users) that I find it practically unusable. Adding Flow to what already works badly sure would not help me. A consistant key mapping that's familiar to PS-converts and logical to Affinity users would be very useful, without causing a lot of work.

The scheme Photoshop uses to control flow works perfectly and should be very easy to learn by Affinity users: It's the same numerical entry as for brush opacity, but with Shift held down while typing numbers.

That is slow. One should hook up Modifiers and context sensitive RMB menu entries for selections as well. The current concentration on the context toolbar only supports the fraction of Affinity users that likes to run a program visually. For users with other preferences it's rather disappointing – Affinity literally hasn't clicked with me yet.

That's pretty good and probably as good as it gets between an external 3rd party RAW app and the layer based editor. That said: I feel zero inclination to drop my legacy, more than 5 years old Photoshop CS6 in favour of this approach, (even if I considered Affinity ready to take over the compositing portion - which I don't). This division meant having to think about colour spaces vs. a setup which just works throughout a whole suite of programs - I'm simply not willing to give silly RAWs that much of an extra role. In PS one has so far an integrated solution, that one may safely discard all input RAWs and still has the source file inside the psd. Highly attractive when editing many file in a row - I only keep the psd's. Upon doubleclick in the PS layerstack one is back in the RAW workspace and if necessary one may export the unprocessed file as well.

I think, standalone RAW editors are most useful for those users who can do the full processing of most images in there and who only rarely have a need for compositing, text overlays etc. For those who start with RAW and who typically end up with a layered file, using a separate RAW (by another vendor/which doesn't know anything about the further editing pipeline) only means a needless workflow-complication. It's interesting though, that some popular programs which started as RAW only tools now add Layers and Text tools and allow editing several RAWs on one canvas - they morph to compositing tools.

Yeah, it's configurable, database or xmp, pretty flexible actually. I am very happy with the editing speed of my old CS6. Anything else I tried so far as a replacement is slower, at least for my RAW use-case. Affinity lacks not only a RAW workflow which plays well with other apps, but it's 'develop one image at a time' paradigm rules it out for anyone who wants to edit series of images efficiency.

Just a little correction here. Photoshop does use sidecars and is incredibly fast with numerous RAW files open. You can embed the RAW to a psd, which may very handy - and of course you may return to the unprocessed RAW at any time.

Maybe using Shift+B as the default mapping to cycle brush- types wouldn't be a bad idea...